Monthly Archives: October 2012

Community Yardsale/Swapmeet – Saturday October 20, 7-10am
Quelab is hosting a big Yardsale/TechSwap Saturday! Help us free up some spare space in the lab! We invite all of our friends to come on down. You’re welcome to bring things to trade or sell; all we ask that you donate a portion of your proceeds to Quelab (you decide how much). *Was a pretty big success! Thanks to everyone who helped or attended!!*

Learn to Screen Print – Saturday October 20, 1-3pm
Always wanted to make your own screen printed tshirt, bag, tote, whatever? This is your chance. We’ll teach you how to do it, and we’ll supply the materials. You’ll leave with something you screen printed yourself and the know-how to do it again on your own. Bring something you’d like to screen print, and we’ll provide the rest. *Class was totally sold out, and they had fun!* Photos here! And a Very Cool blogpost by an attendee!

Papercraft Basics – To be Re-Scheduled!
Interested in making paper sculptures? Come learn papercraft basics. Get familiar with materials, develop skills and learn how to make a neat paper sculpture or other project. We’ll have some Halloween themed projects to work on. Due to illness this has been postponed!

DIY Locksmithing – Wednesday November 7, 7-9pm
Learn how locks work and how to pick a lock with one of our experienced members. Click here to register.

Flavor Tripping with Miracle Fruit! – Friday November 16, 7-11pm
Ever want to try miracle fruit? This is your chance. It coats your tongue and makes everything taste sweet. We’ll have miracle fruit tablets and lots of goodies on hand. This is going to be a great time, so come hungry! This is an 18+ event, so plan to relax without the kids. Click here to register.

Quelab is hosting a big Yardsale/TechSwap Saturday! Help us free up some spare space in the lab! We invite all of our friends to come on down. You’re welcome to bring things to trade or sell, all we ask that you donate a portion of your proceeds to Quelab (you decide how much). This is open to anyone! (members and nonmembers alike!!)

We recently received a demo board from Microchip with their new PIC-based Arduino-form-factor development board, the chipKit. While reading skimming through the technical specs, it turns out that it’s definately beyond me, hardware-wise.

The chipKit has a similar form-factor to an Arduino, but it’s major difference is that it is PIC based (not AVR). Additionally, it runs at a different clock-speed and only understands the basic libraries from the Arduino suite. They do indicate that you can plug an Arduino Ethernet shield onto it and it will play ball, but some other boards might not.

But that’s really OK, because they shipped us two other boards to go with it. The chipKit proto-board (a perf-board with some headers) and the Input Board (which has some switches and a small OLED screen). It looks like the perfect brains for a new project.

Any ideas? Show off your grand plans in the comments and I can turn you folks loose on the board at Tuesday’s Hack Night! If you implement an awesome project, you can win the lab $5500 of tools and equipment! We’ve got a couple of months, but only the middle of January!

Greetings Makers and Hackers! I hope everyone enjoyed the Albuquerque Mini Maker Faire, and welcome to everyone who found out about us at the faire, we hope you enjoyed learning about the vibrant community of makers and doers here in the 505.

I would like to remind everyone about the Weekday Workshop we have planned for tomorrow. Our very own Spaceman Greg will be teaching a class on how to paint a stunning space scene. That’s right, Greg will be teaching you how to design your own worlds! If you don’t know what we’re talking about, check out the videos below the cut.

Wear your most rakish spray painting clothes and we’ll teach you how to spray paint your own space scene. If you want to pay at the door, let us know at events@quelab.net and we’ll hold you a slot in our rocketship*; otherwise, sign up at our Eventbrite

Here are some examples, and some process videos from an artist in the San Francisco Bay Area, Paco. Watch through the playlist to see the artist in action.

*Rocketship is metaphorical, unfortunately. It means we’ll keep a spot for you in the class

Its been on my mind for a while that we have been running hacknights here at Quelab about twice a week for over 2 years, And we still get questions as to what “Hacknight is?”

Basically its part OpenHouse, part generic project work time, and part social time to talk about ideas and projects with other folks with diverse backgrounds and experience. (Members can arrange to get in any time, but it helps to get a good mix of members and non members)

During hacknights we invite members and nonmembers alike to come down and start/work on projects, teach, learn, inspire, share resources, and explore.

Another point of contention is what hacking is, We could call it Makenight, or Inventnight, or Craftnight. But we are a Hackerspace, Harking back to the days before hacker meant computer criminal! Back to when people were tinkering and experimenting, building actual radio shacks in their back yard and then building radios to put in them. When we say Hacking/Hacker we are not talking about the news style sensationalists whom are taking down websites or stealing identities and creditcard numbers. We are talking about grass roots inventors, the folks like Steve Wozniak whom built the first apple computer in a garage!

In the mid 90’s RadioShack started to scale back all of the tinkering bits, the diodes, the transistors, the battery packs, and even worse the kits. Folks stopped making and playing and building things and started just buying whole things with tamper resistant screws, glued shut things, with software licenses that made it illegal to see how it works. We aim to be the antidote to that.

Radioshack had a slogan kinda like “You have questions, We have blank stares!” we aim to be the opposite of that, you have questions we are here to help. You have a dead toaster? Come find out what makes it tick(maybe even fix it). You have an idea for how to build a winter planter for starting your garden seedlings, we want to help you with the tools and others to help. You want to build a robot, or a interactive sculpture, or learn to build a home security system, or even just experiment with light, or heat, or cameras, or rockets, recycling, or candy, or yarncraft… Just about anything you can think of we want you to think of ways you can use Quelab to make that happen!

Here is a link to a slideshow of some of the above mentioned hacks over the last few years, to hopefully inspire you!

So with that said, come on down, our Hacknights are currently Tuesday 7pm-10pm and Sunday 7pm-10pm! Our hope is to grow with your help to the point where we can have hack a lot more Hackdays and Hacknights! What would you build?